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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

You can have several different Linux distributions installed at the same time and dual boot like a lot of people do between some Linux distribution and Windows. You may want to opt not to install a bootloader when installing the second distribution though, and instead just update the bootloader configuration of your original distribution.

Do you want to have all of them available to boot at the same time (multi-boot), or do you want to replace RH with a different distro?

Either is quite possible (I had a multi-boot of 2 versions of Windows and 5 versions of Linux), but multi-booting is more complex, depending on what you hope to accomplish and what files need to be accessible under all distributions.

You can see how I did it in the how-to that I wrote about multi-booting, which should at least give you an idea about one way that it can be done.

If you don't want to repartition the RH drive, you'll need another drive.... if you have no free space, you have no other choice but to acquire some if you aren't going to make some (by repartitioning, which is admittedly a pain to do with a running system).

Sorry, what is a mouse combo? And what does that have to do with your bootloader? And what point in this process have you reached?

You normally choose what OS to boot when you boot the PC, not before you reboot. I can't see what benefits you would get from doing it any other way, even if it was possible, which I don't think it is.

I'm not understanding what problem you're trying to solve in the above post.

The mouse combo is a keyboard and mouse that go through one USB port. It took me a long while to get it to work yet when I boot RH 9 doesnt recognize until I get to the login, I.E. I cant change which distro to boot.

Ah, yes. RedHat uses GRUB by default as it's boot loader. GRUB does not like USB keyboards. I cannot remember how, or indeed if you can work around this, so my advice would be to change over to LiLo. There should almost definitely be a package on the install discs for LiLo.

<edit>
Oh, and before I forget. If you have some free space on your current harddrive, then go partition it and install your other Linuxen into them. If you don't, and you don't want to re-partition and re-install RedHat, then go get a/some new harddrive(s).

There are two main ways to multi-boot Linux. You can have one bootloader than loads them all, in which case you should not install any other bootloaders from any other distros. This is the more "elegant" solution, but can bring headaches if you constantly chop-and-change (as I do). In order to make this work, you'd need to install your Nth distro (sans bootloader); boot into your favoured distro (RedHat, for instance); mount your new distro's partition; copy over the kernel and initrd files; add them to your current bootloader; reboot.

Another method (and my prefered method) is to install your Nth distro, and install the bootloader to the root partition of the Nth distro, and have an entry in your main bootloader pointing to that partition. That way you technically have multiple bootloaders, but it can save a lot of hassle.

For example, in my setup I am (currently) running Mandrake 9.1, Mandrake 10, SuSE 9 "technology preview" edition and QNX. The partition that Mandy 10 and QNX reside are constantly changing (I am a habitual tester and fiddler of distros). I have Mandy 9.1 installed on hda in it's entirety. Mandrake 10 is installed on /dev/hdb1; SuSE is installed on /dev/hdb2 and QNX is on /dev/hdb3. The entries in my lilo.conf file simply point to the partition, as follows:

Code:

other=/dev/hdb1
label="hdb1_mandy_10"

When I select that, I am presented with another bootloader, this time from Mandy 10. It is by far less elegant, but it does allow me to chop-and-change my secondary/testing distros with relative ease.
</edit>

Post a copy of your current grub.conf file and I'll take a look at it. Oh, and could you put it in between [ code ] tags please? It formats it nicely and makes it easier to read off the screen. Thanks.